Beau Beausoleil is the most important voice of witness in our country right now. Deepest gratitude for his comprehensive vision, deepest care and unending love for truth and justice.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Sidekick
Beau Beausoleil mourns the dead. Outside his kitchen window are the killing grounds of Gaza; his front door opens to guns trained on American cities that dared give sanctuary to strangers. These poems curse those who have shed innocent blood and “the President shaking his fist/at the poor and sick at heart.” He writes “Let life be at its worst/for someone who thinks/a child will not remember.” Sometimes you need, the poet says, “the words that find us after the rage has left us without words.” The blessing is they’re here.
—Richard Harrison, author of My Mother Joins the Resistance
In these fierce, pithy poems, Beau Beausoleil writes, “Then/write what/only/your/heart/can see.” What makes this collection so urgent and compelling is Beausoleil’s unflinching yet tender eye as it inventories an empire on the edge of madness, an empire that both enables a genocide abroad and creates carceral systems at home. In Writing My Country, the poet never fails to return us to what matters in our existence—namely, to find “a day of listening only to the under/sky of dreaming earth.” Don’t miss these luminous dispatches from a poet whose language is an inkwell that keeps giving and blossoming.
—Deema K. Shehabi, author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon
Thank you, Beau Beausoleil, for Writing My Country and giving us these poems of urgency and calls to action. “It is not lost in our thoughts that words shape/and reshape our lives and our country / even as we kiss our children goodnight.” In his spare, incisive work, Beau reminds us of the important role poets can play in these horrific times. In the tradition of the poet as witness, Beau urges us not to despair, but to act and to “sing the most painful songs of our country.”
—Angie Minkin, author of Lineage Songs
Writing My Country is an insistent call to reckon with the “shallow graves of our living history” in places like Iraq, Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, and the ways that a country’s view of itself, and those that enable it, distorts and darkens the possibility of life itself. Beausoleil gives us a beautiful and haunting requiem for the very dark time in which we are living.
—Persis Karim, editor of Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora
Beau Beausoleil’s poems articulate the nightmare that is happening now, the wars and genocides committed in our name. Even while expressing the rage we feel over these atrocities, the poems are beautiful. They bring laughter, tears, anger, hope, and awe. “I pray one day the sadness/of their rage will leave their guns empty.” No matter how bleak, these poems lift you up. Only a profound poet can do that.
—Sharon Doubiago, author of Naked to the Earth
Stones, flowers nailed to doors, Gaza genocide, the siege of Minnesota—Beau Beausoleil is surely writing our country, creating ironic landscapes of grief, anger, and dreams, building our country poem by poem…tough lyrics… Writing My Country give us hope. Keep it by your side.
—Hilton Obenzinger, author of Witness 2017-2020
Beau Beausoleil has done the remarkable. This is lyric poetry at its finest even as it cries resistance.
—Mary Jo McConahay, author of Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right
Powerful work which involves the reader with a very visceral yet beautiful language of despair and hope.
—Leora Skolkin-Smith, Israeli-American Novelist
Raven & Wren Press 